


I Guess there's no Time like the Past

by halbstunde



Series: The Acts of Time [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: BAMF Stiles, Future Fic, Gen, Magic, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-03
Updated: 2014-03-03
Packaged: 2018-01-14 11:42:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1265251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halbstunde/pseuds/halbstunde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years and years and years ago, this situation would've ended in the end of all ends, the finale of finales, the last words in a long, horrible book. I would've died. That’s what I’m trying to say here. No more Stiles, no more anyone. There’s good news though. It isn't years and years and years ago, no matter how much I wish it was. No, it’s been a couple decades and I've got a couple more tricks than I did back then, and I even got the ultimate ace up my sleeve. If by ace up my sleeve you mean a glaringly obvious plan that everyone and their brother is trying to stop me from completing. But hey, I've got like a mile head start so there’s a 15% chance I’m not gonna die in the next hour. After that, anything could happen</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Guess there's no Time like the Past

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this because there can never be enough stories about time travel. More to come, at a later date! Warnings: a good amount of violence in this, mentions of blood.

The air is cold, and not the cold where maybe a nice winter coat with no holes in it would suffice in keeping you warm (as if I had one of those anyway). No, this is the cold where it feels like the air managed to condense into a giant fist that will punch you with all it’s got at any piece of exposed skin and still manage to get a bone deep chill everywhere else. It was cold produced by magic, and only magic can fend it off. I’m strong enough to keep it down to a slight chill, but if the still forms layered in coats and blankets laying on the ground say anything, it’s that the average Joe was not so lucky. It’s my fault they’re like this and I’d feel bad about it if I had the time to spare them more than a glance and a passing thought, but I don’t. I haven’t had time in years. It’s a luxury and shouldn’t be wasted on things that can’t be changed. I keep running, the streets still familiar even empty, trashed, and abandoned. I guess when you live somewhere for the first twenty years of your life, it sticks with you.

I know where they expect me to go. They think I’m gonna go back to the second Hale House, burnt out ruins just like the first one, the irony not lost to anyone. Another arson case, different perpetrator. Two days ago, they would’ve been right and my chance of living would’ve been 5% instead of my current, wonderful 15%. But I was lucky, oh so beautifully lucky, and let me say that I’m rarely lucky, fortuna smiled upon me at last on that fantastic day. I’d gotten a huge source of energy that I wouldn’t have dared to hope I could get my hands on. So I’m not going to the Hale House. No sir. I’m going to my old house, the only real home I’d ever known, that I left almost thirty years ago.

I set up scent traps to convince them I’m Hale House bound, but that’ll fail the minute they get into a 100 meter radius of the house but every second counts and I’m thankful of every one I get.

Finally, I turn onto my street, and there it is, the Stilinski home. The shutters are falling off, the yard full of dead grass, a few broken windows. Could be worse, the building is at least still standing. Walking up to the porch, the door is already slightly cracked open. Which is great because I definitely lost my key years ago. Not like I’m gonna live here. There’s still a small pang of sadness over seeing my home like this but it won’t matter soon enough anyways. I’ll either be dead or gone in the next fifteen minutes. I run up the stairs, taking off my back pack once I get into my old room. There’s still some of my old stuff, things I thought were important but really lost their value when it turned out all they would do was weight me down.

I’ve got enough items of course and  I’ve memorized the runes to connect them in the circle so well I could do this even in my sleep in no time flat (thank fuck I did). Time travel has always been flakey. You don’t really know who succeeds and who doesn’t unless they write it down, and no one is really privy to the idea of telling they’re from the future as it turns out. Even if they make it back, time would’ve been rewritten and their future selves wouldn’t need to time travel anyways, so wouldn’t that mean that they never time traveled in the first place so nothing would’ve changed at all? Or would they travel back in time and basically create a separate timeline for you while your old line is left to survive without you? What if you go back and it turns out you were always meant to go back and future you were in is set in stone and will happen no matter what you do because it already happened? Well guess what. I don’t know how time travel works, and I sure as hell don’t care because what matters is that it does work and I’m going to do it. Nothing is ever set in stone, especially not with magic involved.

The most notable of those who time traveled was the great Merlin himself. He apparently traveled back successfully several times if his journal is anything to go by. It better be reliable because that thing was a bitch to find, and honestly? I never want to pry something out of a skeleton’s hands ever again. Not a fun experience. Great read though, Merlin had a way with words. It was a real loss when it got ruined, but blood stains don’t really come out of really old paper so no point in crying over spilt plasma.  Anyways, Merlin wrote about his efforts in traveling into the past. What he discovered was that the only spell known to work for sure would only transport you to you. Makes not sense right? Well it was originally written as a teleportation spell that would transport you to a person who had a certain rune written on their skin, kind of making you a pigeon and the person the home you’re trained to return to. Kinda. The spell was a total failure for its intended purpose. Teleportation takes a fuck ton of energy and won’t work with a simple rune on an arm. The guy who tried to create it was determined to make it work though. He got a buddy to work with him, trying to get the guy to teleport to him, and surprise surprise, it doesn’t work. So our nutjob wizard gives up for the day, tells his pal to come back tomorrow and they’ll try again. Next day he tells his pal to draw the rune on himself, and he tries to perform the spell and teleport to him. And it works. The guy was truly amazed, he described it as if leaving his own body only to be slammed back into it and feel like he was hit with a boulder twice his size. He looks up and his buddy isn’t right next to him like he should be. He looks down and his own clothes weren’t the same. His friend wasn’t wearing the same thing either. It was what they both had worn yesterday. The friend called out and asked if he had finished writing the rune, the same exact thing he had said yesterday. Of course the guy freaks out and realizes he finally isn’t some crack pot. He successfully created a method for time travel. How much he uses it and what for isn’t really clear in Merlin’s writing, but it is noted he dies in some weird dragon accident six months later, but not before substantial research was put into his spell.

Merlin discovered the research and worked with the spell himself. Merlin had come across the spell early in his life, much like myself, though I had no idea the potential it could hold at a the time. Through Merlin’s research, he established several rules for the spell. First Rule: Performing the spell on your own was pointless. Without any extra items that hold magical energy and using purely his own inherent magic, Merlin managed to go back about two years at his best. It’s probably important to note that Merlin was the best of the best, strongest of the strong. More than likely because he had so much time to practice magic. Which brings me to the Rule Two: Magic skills practiced and improved travel with you. So you get to be about one hundred twenty years old (*cough* Merlin) and go back in time, your increased magical power comes along with you. Rule Three: Most any supernatural creature that knew the you in the past will know something is different about you, which Merlin theorized could be just a general change that came to a person with time, nothing bad like the aura of death and destruction. Fourth Rule: Any bindings or deals made through magic will carry on with you. Whether the other person had been involved yet or not, the binding or deal still stands. Rule Five: It’s a one way trip. You can’t go forward. You’ll eventually get back to the time in the future when you left, but Merlin said it was literally never the same, no matter how little he changed, it was always different. Rule Six: You can’t go back further once you’ve gone gone back until you reach the point in time that you had traveled back at. So you can’t go back a year, recharge your magical batteries, then hop back another. Rule Seven: Nothing material goes with you, you go back you lose everything. The final rule, Rule Eight: You can only travel to points where you had the mark on your body.

I discovered Merlin’s journal only about two months ago, and with those rules in mind, I tried the spell as a test run. I had had the rune tattooed on my forearm when I was twenty five, just in case, and at this point I was thankful for my planning ahead. Anything worth changing happened around six months ago, so if I went back that far I would’ve been stoked. What ended up happening was I went back a week in my hotel room. Which was worthless. So I went back to reading the book and Merlin, that sly bastard, added it in on the last page, like the thought totally just slipped his mind. The spell needed to be performed at a max of ten feet away from the spot you were at in the past. I felt like that was a really important fact to mention, maybe with all the other very super important rules that were literally listed out numerically. It’s like Deaton descended from Merlin himself and all he got from it was a bit of magic and the habit of withholding substantially important info until the last second. Whatever, I figured it out eventually. The most I can go back is about two months. Again, worthless. So I set out on a trek across the globe in search of magically endowed items. Up until two days ago I had enough to go back about nine years, which was more than I could ever hope for. I had begun traveling back to Beacon hills to get to the Hale House which is where I was at the that point in time, when I got caught by an Alpha. He was decently sized, two hundred pounds of pure muscle, of course. His nose was smooshed like it’d been broken, which means he must’ve been fighting with another alpha recently. He had cropped blond hair and just the most ridiculous ears. They stuck out and were way too big to be proportional with the rest of his head, I bet if he put focus too it he could wiggle each one separately. His beady eyes did nothing to compliment him, nor his thin lips. Over all this guy was on the lower half of average looking, borderline ugly. He snarled and went for the intimidating look, nothing I haven’t seen before.

In the past that meant something to me. I was terrified of Peter, then Derek, then the entire Alpha pack. That was around thirty or so years ago, when the best I could do was make a circle with some mountain ash. Now it’s different. I’ve taken down at least four alphas on my own, six with help. Help is never coming again, but this guy would’ve been nothing but a momentary distraction who only gave away my location to the rest of the Alphas. Except for one little thing: I had a jar. Not just any jar though, oh no. This is a jar to end all other jars, for it is magic. Egyptian Magic.Which means it is literally the best type of jar I could want in this situation.

The thing about Egyptian magic is that the magic is tightly entwined with shifting magic, maybe not werewolf shifting, but shifting nonetheless. The magic is ancient and in tune with the earth, not to mention extremely powerful and difficult to use. And this Jar. This wonderful, amazing, fantastic jar that I went through an entire pyramid full of booby traps and ancient spells and almost died for only to find it was devoid of an sort of magical energy, was specifically made to contain Egyptian magic. Egyptian magic, which is closely involved with shifter magic. So like I said, Fortuna was smiling on me.

This Alpha thinks his chances are pretty good against me if the way he’s standing like he’s gonna pounce means anything. So instead of waiting for him to get the first hit, I let my magic run throughout every vein of my body, giving me equal if not better strength as the Alpha. It was a good trick I picked up in my twenties, especially since I needed to keep up with werewolves.

I leap at the guy, surprising him. His burning red eyes don’t scare me anymore and eyes like those probably never will again. There’s nothing left to lose to them except for my own life, everything else taken. So I tackle him to the ground and pin his limbs by manipulating some tree roots underground. They won’t hold more than a minute or two but that’s all I’ll need because I have my newly prized possession: The Jar. I pull a knife from my belt, and stab him directly in the heart. His eyes widen and he howls, but a twist and a few moments later and that ends, leaving only a horrible quiet. As the red drains out of his unfocused eyes, I guide the alpha spark through my knife to my palm. It’s not even very sparky, just basically an orb the size of a ping pong ball that glows red. I set it in The Jar, which I’ve come to love and treat as a close friend because rarely are things able to contain a quarter as much power as an alpha spark. A spark had enough energy to send me back twenty-five years all on its own, but I hadn’t even considered going after an Alpha because the only one’s that I won’t feel bad about killing travel in the Alpha Pack and killing one on your own when it knows it’s being chased is hard enough. This idiot was easily caught off guard, making me the luckiest bastard in the world. Even if his howl alerted the alphas. I left pretty quickly afterwards. I was already within the city limits of Beacon Hills, and it’s not like the witch that took over the town was going to stop me, not if the Alphas are heading towards her territory. Even if I wanted to throttle her for destroying my home town and killing so many. Maybe another day I’ll go after her. Okay, probably not, I’ll either be dead or in the past but who knows? Maybe I’ll get my chance.

And that gets us caught up to where we started. I’ve got the items lined up, drawn the right runes connecting them to the center where I’ll stand on the floor. I can sense the power of the Alpha pack, they’re heading towards the house, they’re close, but it doesn’t matter now. I start chanting the lines of the spell, feel the power in the containers I’ve collected in the past couple months move into me. Enough to send me back to the first moment I scribbled the rune on my arm, so many years ago when I came across a mention of the spell on the internet, on a night when I was sixteen. My tattoos begin to glow and heat up. I can hear the Alphas at the entry way and know it’s going to be a close call.

Deucalion, the almighty, self righteous, pack murdering, son of bitch himself rips the door to my old bed room off its hinges. His grotesque face, distorted through the combination of too much power and extreme insanity, looks only at me as he dives into the room, claws out and roaring, to try and kill me before it’s too late. Pure rage encompasses his  face as he launches closer. A smile, a genuine smile, one I haven’t worn in years, creeps across my face as the last word spills out of my mouth. Deucalion slashes his claws against my chest, the skin looking like red ribbons and we both fall to the floor, but it’s too late. I just laugh at him, too elated with my success, the pain doing nothing to deter my good mood. The world around me begins the disappear, first the wolves that had been right behind Deucalion start to break up into particles that just flow away, out of the house. Then the furniture and walls break apart, and if the way Deucalion’s eyes widen and he momentarily stops shredding my limbs, he sees it too. Then as he almost completes one final swipe of his claws across my throat, he too break apart and I soon follow, the pain disappearing, replaced by nothingness as the world turns to black.

I open my eyes and take a single, shaky breath


End file.
